3.0 GHz octocore base model for $4000 - that’s $1500 more than the quad-core 2.66 GHz. No other changes, as far as I can tell. Too bad - I want a cheap Conroe-based Mac Pro that uses standard DDR2 instead of the super-expensive FB-DIMMs required by Intel’s Woodcrest/Clovertown chipset.

They call it “the Starbucks sound.” It is meant to serve as a placid soundtrack to your Starbucks coffee-drinking experience. It is not, as you might expect, the sound of dual cash registers chiming in unison as five automatic milk foamers screech in disharmony as 12 kids from eight different minivans march in and scream their want of a dozen grande Tazo strawberry high-fructose chai tealike milkshake things as their wary parents whip out the credit card and sigh and yell at the kids to please shut the hell up.

Wikipedia’s official picture of a “CD-RW drive” is the exact drive model of my first CD burner: the trusty Yamaha 4x2x6 internal SCSI drive. I still have it somewhere in my mother’s basement. To the best of my knowledge, it still works.

I have more computers than I know what to do with. I have two computers perfectly capable of playing today’s hottest new high-budget super-realistic 3D simulators of stuff blowing up in a complete virtual world.

Microsoft’s biggest weakness is that they still don’t realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

It looks interesting, but their site is remarkably light on information. From poking around, I found that it costs $699 empty, and you can add up to 4 SATA hard drives to it. It does some sort of RAID-5-like replication at a higher level (not at the drive-block level), effectively giving you [total - 1 drive] capacity. You can only lose 1 drive at a time and keep your data.

It only mounts via USB, and while you can move it between hosts, it uses NTFS for Windows and HFS for OS X (depending on which OS it’s set up with) so you can’t have full read/write access between a PC and a Mac.

It seems like a very overpriced, over-marketed device that might offer some usefulness to a few rich nerds, but probably isn’t worth the immense cost premium over a better, faster, more resilient, better-supported standard RAID setup of similar capacity.

Microsoft would have told EMI to stick their DRM-free tracks up their ass. And the classic Microsoft, the Microsoft with a set of balls, would have told EMI that if they wanted to sell DRM-free tracks elsewhere, at other stores, that they’d suddenly find the terms changed for their songs at the market-dominating Microsoft store.

I wrote about this a while ago in Should the iPod support Ogg?, but Daring Fireball points out an entirely new reason (as if Apple needed another): Ogg probably violates some MP3 patents, or comes close enough to ensure a painful and expensive court battle, and no big company wants to put themselves at risk by officially supporting it in their high-profile products.

They passed a non-binding resolution (what does that accomplish, exactly?) to declare the proper way of punctuating the possessive form of Arkansas is with an apostrophe-S instead of just an apostrophe.

Our office actually has the cool MoMA ceramic version of the classic paper NYC coffee cup. Just like the paper one, it gets a bit too hot to hold if you’re moving around with it, but it’s great for desk use. It even has the little fold-over ridge from the wrap-together edge of the “paper” down one side.

The lack of open source software billionaires is by design. It’s part of the intent of open source software - to balance the scales by devaluing the obscene profit margins that exist in the commercial software business.

By locking in users and then not supporting their own lock-in features, they’re effectively making it very hard for many Mac Office 2004 users to upgrade to Office 2008, forcing a lot of their customers to reevaluate which desktop applications to use. It’s the same story with VB 6 and VB.Net, and it’s the same story with Windows XP and Vista.

— Joel Spolsky on the effects of Microsoft dropping VBA support from Mac Office<br/>

An outstanding offer from Fog Creek ensures that the first time they have to wake up at 8 a.m. and put on a suit for a high-pressure interview with Oracle - well, when the alarm goes off, there’s a good chance they’ll say to themselves, why the heck am I getting up when I already have an excellent job waiting for me at Fog Creek? My hope is they won’t even bother going to that interview.

To give you an idea on the kind of traffic we get, picture this: Snowstorm, 2 feet of snow. All schools are closed, all roads iced over, even penguins refuse to leave their houses. We do $18,000 in sales.

This is almost 3 years old, yet it’s surprisingly relevant today (lots of discussion about “Longhorn”, which you probably know as Windows Vista), and it’s one of Joel’s best articles. It’s amazing how little has changed since the time of its writing.

For any web developer unfortunate enough to need to read a cookie from an off-domain IFRAME in IE6 and IE7, you need to specify a P3P compact policy (CP) in the headers for both the framed page and whatever page sets the cookie you’re trying to read.

P3P is a poorly designed, poorly implemented “standard” that no browsers support except Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7. (And even then, it’s only half-assed, and only the Compact Policy is ever checked.)

Marilee Jones never even had a college degree, yet she lied on her resume to get an entry-level job at MIT in 1979. Nearly 30 years later, MIT ended up with a dean that had never been to college, yet claimed to have degrees from three.

Last Tumblr comment from Ghostvirus: “Tumblr needs to stop reformatting all images as JPGs. I know they’re doing this in an attempt to keep bandwidth usage down, but when a tiny PNG gets reformatted into a JPG that’s 2 or 3 or even 4 times the size the PNG originally was, you’re not doing yourself any favors.”

Stop revealing our feature list before we do! This has been on my to-do list for almost a month, and it’ll happen soon.

We don’t recompress to save bandwidth - we recompress because we resize every image to fit in Tumblr’s narrow columns, and it’s much easier to manage if we can apply the same compression to every image.

But we’re not happy with the image quality, even with images that are better served by the JPEG format, so we’re switching to a different image library. And while I’m in there, I’m going to ensure that PNGs and GIFs (maybe even animated ones) are kept in their original format for better quality and better size efficiency.

I don’t get it. I set up Wordpress on DreamHost with the default settings and put up a few of my favorite links and insights. Why does my hit counter think I only have 4 viewers per day? It must be broken.

Faux-comments aside, the “reblog” feature irked me, precisely because I figured that it would turn this medium into an orgy of content appropriation. I think the fact that it doesn’t credit the original poster or provide a link is what’s really bugging me. Do that, make it uneditable, do something to show that content has been ReBlogged, and I would completely approve. Until I change my mind.

We hear you. Every reblogged post tracks where you got it from and where it originated - and this data can’t be edited out. Attribution is permanently recorded, but we don’t display this yet in the themes. In fact, none of the new features (friends, followers, ReBlogging) are integrated in the themes yet - and that’s intentional. We don’t take theme updates lightly, because they change the fundamental public-facing interface of everyone’s tumblelogs.

There’s a lot to be said for keeping reblogged content editable. It’s a mechanism to quote someone else’s content, but add your own commentary. We found that many people would browse Radar or their friends’ tumblelogs and copy popular content manually onto their own tumblelogs (usually without attribution). ReBlogging simply automates this process and adds automatic attribution tracking - you just don’t see it publicly yet.

Initially in development, it was just a straight copy. We found that testers reblogged fewer posts because they didn’t want someone else’s description of a link (for instance) on their tumblelog - they wanted to add their own commentary. Once we made the content editable, ReBlogging became much more useful.

So don’t worry. ReBlogged posts always maintain attribution, and once we finish integrating attribution into the themes, you’ll see it.

I can’t believe this… <form><input/></form> is invalid in XHTML Strict. All <input> elements must be inside other block-level elements (even though <form> is a block-level element) under <form>. Who thought that was a good idea? Not a web developer, I bet…

As a huge laptop fan, the one thing that frustrates me is that even with a high-end 7200 RPM hard drive, everyday laptop performance is abysmal compared to a desktop with a fast disk. And having used a RAID-0 desktop, I’ve seen first-hand that there are huge real-world performance gains. If a proper backup is maintained (and that’s a big “if”), there’s no reason not to.

Test taking is the most important skill necessary to succeed in college. […] What does that say about college? Who’s going to pay anyone to take a test? What does a test measure? It measures your ability to memorize stuff. Who is paid to memorize stuff? Actors? Pilots? I don’t know. I’ve never been paid to memorize stuff.

Paradoxically, the buildings which tend to be in better condition are the historic ones, the ones built before modular-snap-together materials existed, the ones made of materials found in nature, the ones built with non-electric hand tools. They manage to resist the natural ravages of time. Their roofs were designed to bear snow loads and to shed water in a way that protected the rest of the structure. The materials never promised to be maintenance-free, so the owners and caretakers naturally perform the required routine repairs. They stand there as reminders that our notion of progress-through-technology is a slippery thing.